Is Tamzin Taylor the ultimate geek girl? The head of apps for Google Play, Western Europe, tall and slim with a shock of Nordic-white hair, is a picture of feminine power as she strides on stage at Myriad 2017 in Brisbane, plants her feet wide and tells an auditorium full of bearded hipsters in skinny black jeans how Europe is faring in the start-up stakes.
"One thing Europe is not doing well on is the female front," notes the London-based former Sydneysider whose job it is to know what everyone else in the audience desperately wants to: how to make money with apps or games on Android and Google Play. "Eighty per cent of businesses that went for funding last year were run by men."
Or is Ally Watson the ultimate geek girl? "I worked in an office with 40 people and I was the only girl and it sucked," says Watson, a developer, computer science graduate and co-founder of Code Like A Girl. In the kinds of places she's worked, she tells the packed conference room, female developers are often given the job of cleaning up code men have written. "That's the housework," she states, deadpan.
Or maybe Anouk Wipprecht is the ultimate geek girl. She's a "fashiontech" designer, combining electronics, science and couture to produce "dresses with brains", among other intriguing creations. Sensors in her robotic spider dress monitor the space around the wearer; it raises its arms to "attack" if people come too close. Her ethereal smoke dress monitors stress reactions with hidden sensors, and puffs out a warning like a squid squirting ink.
Dressed for her session in a floaty high-low fairy gown with a sleeveless denim balero, Wipprecht says things have changed since she began coming to these events in the early 2000s. She said men would often ask her, "What are you doing here, are you the wife, or in marketing?", she recounts. "I was like, you better think twice!" But "I don't think those conversations happen any more".
Unconscious bias
It would be better not to refer to how these women look. It would be better not to label them as if they were in a freak category, like Wonder Woman. It would be better, in fact, not to have to refer to their gender at all, because the moment they're identified as "she", unconscious bias sets in, and their work gets harder.
"Every step of the way, their gender is seen before the ideas they are presenting," says Nicola Hazell, head of SheStarts, an accelerator program for female entrepreneurs. It was set up by the Sydney-based start-up incubator BlueChilli to address a "massive gap" in its portfolio, where only 20 to 30 per cent of its start-up founders were women.
Start-ups have a woman problem: there aren't nearly enough of them. One of the consequences is "bro culture", as described recently in The New York TImes. The typical "bro" CEO in start-up land is a cocky young man with buckets of money and a posse of fawning admirers, who "creates a culture built on reckless spending and excessive partying, where bad behaviour is not just tolerated but even encouraged".
"Women get hired, but they rarely get promoted and sometimes complain of being harassed. Minorities and older workers are excluded."
The current case in point is Uber. The ride-hailing company is in crisis after a series of revelations highlighting a toxic bro culture led by its chief executive, Travis Kalanick, including an incident in which he took employees to an escort-karaoke bar in Seoul in 2014. A female employee later complained. Other women have reported sexual harassment. Kalanick has promised to "fundamentally change as a leader and grow up". He's 40, notes the Times.
Could it happen here? A 2015 global survey ranked Australia the second-best business environment in the world for female entrepreneurship. Even so, women are lamentably unrepresented in the innovation ecosystem at the heart of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's ideas boom, which is supposed to deliver Australia's future jobs and prosperity.
Gender balance
About one-third of the scheduled sessions at the Myriad 2017 event for start-ups and investors at Brisbane's Powerhouse featured female speakers, indicating the organisers worked hard to achieve a respectable gender balance along with "a general sense of badass-ness". But they overshot the industry reality, as the dispiriting numbers cited by some of the female presenters showed. Fewer than one in four start-ups are led by women in Australia. Among start-ups attracting investment, only 4 per cent are women-led, said Hazell. Women account for less than 25 per cent of the IT workforce, and they're paid 28 per cent less than men, said Watson.
The problem is partly in the pipeline – not enough girls are studying science, technology, maths and engineering subjects. In Australia, only 2.8 per cent of women contemplate a career in engineering or computing compared to 16.3 per cent of boys, according to OECD figures. Since 2001, male ICT (information and communication technology) undergraduate enrolments have declined by almost 30 per cent while female ICT enrolments have declined by 65 per cent.
For a girl aged 7 or 10 who's interested, but finds herself the sole female in a class of 15 boys, "it's very hard to get them to hang on until they finish high school and get to a degree", says Vanessa Doake, co-founder with Ally Watson of Code Like A Girl, which they set up in Melbourne to encourage females into tech careers. The group hosts events and workshops so that girls can "see 20 girls in a room having fun coding as normal". They're about to launch in Sydney.
Problem of retention
Then there's the problem of retention. A 2008 Harvard Business Review study found that in the US, 50 per cent of female ICT workers leave the sector, with the rate of attrition peaking when women are in their mid to late-30s, as the pressures of family and career escalate simultaneously. Other factors cited in the study included a hostile macho culture, isolation in the workforce, unclear and/or stalled career paths and inferior systems of rewards. Although no comparable study has been done in Australia the Australian Computer Society believes the trend is the same here.
Accelerator programs such as SheStarts and another run by Springboard Enterprises Australia support women to start their own companies and keep control of them. The not-for-profit Springboard program has graduated 36 companies in the past five years that have together raised more than $173 million and created hundreds of jobs, says SBE Australia chair Topaz Conway. All are still in business, and most are exporting or have set up global offices. The City of Sydney has just renewed its sponsorship of SBE Australia with a grant of $35,000 a year for the next three years. "This initiative will support individual women and their companies, and in the long term it will help expand the city's start-up ecosystem and support the local economy," Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore said.
Catherine Armitage travelled to Brisbane as a guest of Myriad 2017.